Kishida's approval rate falls into dangerous territory amid scandal

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s support rate is in dangerous territory after plunging to 17% — the worst figure for a prime minister from the Liberal Democratic Party in more than a decade — following his party's political funds scandal.

In a Jiji poll released Thursday evening, the support rate for Kishida’s Cabinet was 17.1%, down from 21.3% the previous month. In September 2009, then-Prime Minister Taro Aso’s administration registered a rate of 13.4% just before the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan came into power.

The LDP’s support rate is suffering as well, slumping to 18.3%, the lowest figure since the party regained power in December 2012.

In the Jiji poll, 86% said the five LDP factions accused of underreporting income from fundraising events — the focus of the scandal — have not offered sufficient explanations regarding the money, while only 3.1% said they have. The survey was conducted from Dec. 8 through Monday and involved 2,000 people, of which 59.4% offered valid answers. The survey was conducted prior to further revelations about the underreporting of political funds.

Kishida has been trying to minimize the damage from the scandal, in which the factions gave the unreported money from ticket sales for the parties to their members, many of whom also did not report the funds.

Under the political funds law, political groups need to report revenue from such events if any individual person or company purchases more than ¥200,000 ($1,400) worth of tickets in a year. As long as the flow of money is reported in line with the law, there is nothing wrong with holding fundraising parties or offering kickbacks to faction members.

The group with the suspected largest amount of unreported income — about ¥500 million — is the faction that was led by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Amid mounting criticism and to minimize the damage, Kishida has replaced 12 Abe faction members who held Cabinet or senior government positions, including removing Hirokazu Matsuno as chief cabinet secretary. Three LDP executives are also set to be replaced.

Kishida, who has banned his party from holding fundraising events for the time being, has said that the factions should find out what happened and explain the situation to the public. The LDP, he said, will then come up with measures to prevent a recurrence based on those findings.

“I will be at the forefront of the LDP, being a ball of fire, to regain public trust,” Kishida said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Tokyo prosecutors are planning to raid the Abe faction office as well as question lawmakers.

Some Abe faction lawmakers have said that they were instructed by the “faction side” not to report the kickbacks as political funds, without elaborating on who actually gave the instructions.

The faction’s administrative officials had a list of how many tickets each member sold, and another list of how much would be documented in the political funds report.

The underreporting allegations surfaced in late November, when it was reported that five major LDP factions, including the one that Kishida had led until last week, made a total of ¥40 million from unreported ticket sales over the four years through 2021.

But in the past few weeks, the figure has grown — first to ¥100 million, and then to ¥500 million for the Abe faction alone — with findings and witness accounts increasingly showing that the underreporting was intentional and systematic, rather than a mistake.